Science | WPN World People News

They lie dormant for years, but at the first sign of favorable conditions they awaken. This sounds like the tagline for a science fiction movie, but it describes the amazing life-cycles of microbial organisms that form the biological soil crusts (BSCs) of Earth's deserts. Now a research team with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has reported a unique molecular-level analysis of a BSC cyanobacterium responding to the wetting and drying of its environment. The results hold implications for land management, improved climate change models, and a better understanding of carbon cycling in soil microbial communities and how changes in global temperatures impact Earth's deserts.

Assembly of the backbone of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the primary mirror backplane support structure, is a step closer to completion with the recent addition of the backplane support frame, a fixture that will be used to connect all the pieces of the telescope together.

This photo shows the ice front of Venable Ice Shelf, West Antarctica, in October 2008. It is an example of a small-size ice shelf that is a large melt water producer. The image was taken onboard the Chilean Navy P3 aircraft during the NASA/Centro de Estudios Cientificos, Chile campaign of Fall 2008 in Antarctica.

This graphic depicts the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter measuring the temperature of a cross section of the Martian atmosphere as the orbiter passes above the south polar region.

• Twenty-six black hole candidates have been identified in Andromeda, aka M31, adding to 9 previously found.
• This is the largest number of possible black holes to date ever found in a galaxy outside of our own Milky Way.
• These are stellar-mass black holes, which are formed by the collapse of a giant star and have masses between five and 10 times the Sun's.
• Researchers used over 150 separate Chandra observations spread over 13 years to obtain these results.

Much like in an old tube television where a beam of electrons moves over a phosphor screen to create images, the new microscopy technique works by scanning a beam of electrons over a sample that has been coated with specially engineered quantum dots. The dots absorb the energy and emit it as visible light that interacts with the sample at close range. The scattered photons are collected using a similarly closely placed photodetector (not depicted), allowing an image to be constructed.

This prototype is the first ever molybdenum based image sensor, 5 times more sensitive than current silicium-based technology.

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images of the gold-indium alloy nanoparticles at room temperature. (A) shows an overview of multiple particles, while (D) shows a high-resolution TEM image of one nanoparticle's crystalline gold-indium core surrounded by the amorphous and catalytic oxide shell.

Permafrost zones occupy nearly a quarter of the exposed land area of the Northern Hemisphere. NASA's Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment is probing deep into the frozen lands above the Arctic Circle in Alaska to measure emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane from thawing permafrost - signals that may hold a key to Earth's climate future.

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